Unexcused Absences

This post could also be called “The 2010-2011 Ski Season By The Numbers.” I figure it will be enlightening to break down the last five months quantitatively. In no particular order…

Snowfall

By all local accounts, this was a fantastic year for snow. We have no frame of reference, since it’s our first full season at a big western resort, but even in mid April the slope coverage is quite good. And we picked up almost no rock gouges in our skis, normally a big problem out west.

Grand total snowfall at Beaver Creek, 385 inches (a normal winter is about 310)

Grand total snowfall at Vail, 482 inches (normally 345)

[Update] The final week of the season, Vail hit 500 inches for the year (see the Vail Daily article summarizing the season’s weather).

A ski for (almost) every occasion

Skis

We began this season with 5 pairs of skis in the car on our drive to Colorado; pair of Rossignol race stock 155cm Slalom skis and a pair of 170cm Fischer RX-8 skis for Heather, and a pair of 174cm Rossignol 9X’s, a pair of 178cm Fischer race stock GS skis (for competition) and an older pair of 181cm Fischer GS race skis (cruising) for me.

I’m slightly embarrassed to note that on our drive back to the east coast we will be carrying 11 pairs of skis (well, 10.5 to be precise, but that’s another story *). In addition to the 5 pair detailed above (minus one of my Rossignol 9X’s), we’re bringing a pair of 170cm Fischer Cold Heat all-mountain skis and a pair of 170cm Volkl Kendo powder skis for Heather, plus a pair of 175cm Fischer RC4 Progressor all-mountain skis, a pair of 184cm Volkl Kendo powder skis, and a pair of 191cm race stock Atomic GS skis (courtesy of Scott Snow – thank you!), for me and a pair of 168cm Volkl Tigersharks for dad.

Grand total skis acquired, 6 pair

Tips Collected

I collected $770 in tips, and Heather, who taught twice as many lessons, collected $1,380. For perspective, during Heather’s multi-year ski instructing career at Bryce Resort in Virginia, she received a total of $20 in tips. Sometimes it’s fun to hang out with rich people.

Grand total tips, $2,150

Ski Gear Purchased

In addition to about $200 each spent on ski clothing (pants, base layers, etc.), we bought the following big-ticket items:

• Fischer Cold Heat 170cm skis & bindings – $150
• Fischer RC4 175cm skis & bindings – $345
• Volkl Kendo 170cm skis & bindings – $385
• Volkl Kendo 184cm skis only – $100
• Tecnica Inferno ski boots (for Heather) – $620 (including custom footbed and custom fitting)
• Hotronics electronic ski boot heaters (a set for each of us) – $180

Grand total gear purchased, $2,180 (hey, we almost earned in tips what we spent on gear!). Sadly, I was unable to acquire what I really wanted, a pair of 165cm Blizzard race stock slalom skis.  Next year.

Days and Vertical Skied

Vail Resorts’ Epic Mix system keeps track of pass-holders’ days on mountain and total vertical skied for Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone, and Heavenly. My official count was 75 days and 1,257,725 vertical feet at Vail and Beaver Creek. Heather had 84 days and 950,960 vertical feet on these two mountains. In addition to the official Epic Mix totals we had 3 days at Aspen, 3 days of cross-country skiing at Tennessee Pass, and I had 5 days at Bryce.

Grand total skiing, 86 days and ~1.3 million vertical feet for me, 90 days and ~1 million vertical feet for Heather.

Loot from the Beaver Creek and Instructor Race Series

The local racing series were pretty lucrative for me. In the instructor series (Tuesday afternoons), I won the following items; two pairs of Schneider racing gloves, street value ~$100 each, plus an entire sack full of Bud Lite / Nordica ski straps and Bud Lite / Nordica beer coozies, along with the odd Bud Lite lime-green baseball hat (given away at the insistence of my favorite wife).

In the Beaver Creek Championship Series (Monday mornings), I won a pair of goggles (~$130), a Nordica / Bud Lite ski bag (~$70), a set of top and bottom Mountain Hard Wear base layers (~$90), a Budweiser T-shirt (limited value), another set of bottom Mountain Hard Wear longjohns (which I traded with a fellow racer for a dinner-for-two coupon at Main St. Grill, $30), a stainless steel 40-oz drink canteen (~$20), a Subaru T-shirt (also of limited value), and several more lime green Bud-Lite baseball hats (also given away in the pursuit of marital harmony).

The next-to-last day of the season was the second annual Vintage Race Day. It was quite a show. They had set up an old-style race course, complete with vintage start banner, bamboo gates, and old race bibs. Someone was there renting out ancient ski gear. You could only enter the races if you had gear from before 1995, when shaped skis made their appearance. Heather and I rented old skis and boots for $50, and Heather won a $50 gift certificate to one of the nice on-slope restaurants, which we then traded with a fellow raffle winner for a Hotronics boot/glove warmer/dryer (worth about $50).

The racing was one of the better deals this winter, because my total entry fees were $25 for the Instructor Race Series ($5 each for the five races), and my entry to the Beaver Creek Championship Series was comped because I worked in the race department. In addition, the B.C.C.S included free appetizers and all the Bud Lite you could drink (hey, it was free…) at the after-parties Monday evenings. And to top it off, our team (Coyote Cafe) in the B.C.C.S. won third place for the season, so we received priceless B.C. Championship Series third-place beer mugs. Readers of our previous posts will remember that third place was a tie, and we (generously) offered our mugs to the other third-place team, and then the organizers felt bad and had another set of third-place mugs made up for us. Nice!

Grand total race loot, $590 (not counting all the Bud Lite / Nordica ski straps, beer coozies, or green baseball hats)

The 3pm cookie frenzy

Afternoon Cookies

Skiing at Beaver Creek has a perq that’s unique in the entire ski industry, I believe. At 3pm every day, a parade of “chefs” in white chef outfits appear at the base with hot, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Many days this can turn into a cookie frenzy, giving added gravity to The Beav’s motto, “not exactly roughing it.” Some days we’re still in uniform when the cookies appear, and it’s verboten for employees to get cookies while in uniform.  Still, we had our fair share over the season.

Grand total free cookies, not as many as you might think!

Fancy Restaurant Meals

This count was at zero right up until our final weekend. We had resisted the siren song of all the delicious restaurants at Beaver Creek, in the name of maintaining true to our household austerity plan. A few days ago, though, I saw in the Vail Daily that Ristorante D’Oro was offering $30 fixed price dinners, including soup, salad, main course, and desert, plus $25 bottles of wine. This is a restaurant where the entrees alone are around $30, and the wine list normally starts at $60 and goes to infinity. We rang up Greg and Susan and had a great evening, the one-and-only time we succumbed to the decadence of fine dining this winter.

Grand total fancy restaurant meals, 1

Miscellaneous

A  hand-written note mailed to Heather from one of her 5-year-old students, thanking her for all the fun and hoping to see her again – Priceless!

* The missing ski story. Right now I only have one Rossignol 174cm 9X ski. As you might remember from before, we have some decent extreme terrain here at The Beav. One day a few months ago I was skiing the Stone Creek Chutes in about a foot of fresh powder, and chose Chute 44 to host a yard sale. I flumphed into a pile of heavy powder snow about a third of the way down the chute, my feet and skis stopped dead in their tracks, and in slow motion my center of mass moved out over my feet and down the hill. Over I went, and in an instant I was sliding down the chute face first, quite a bit faster than I was comfortable with. I glanced off an aspen tree (fortunately not a direct hit) and continued my slide all the way to the bottom, discarding skis and poles along the way.

Powder day in Stone Creek

I could see one ski and one pole sticking out of the snow about 75 yards above me, but there was no sign of the other ski or pole. 45 minutes of searching in the deep powder revealed nothing, so I proceeded to ski out of the area on my one remaining ski (skiing moguls is tougher than you’d think on one ski). I returned the next couple days to continue the search, but to no avail. The ski patrol tells me it will be June before the snowpack in this section melts. I left them my phone number and email and the promise of a couple cases of Fat Tire beer if they find my other ski. Hopefully I can report good news on this front in a few months!

The US Ski Team came to town this week. There was a pair of FIS (International Ski Federation) slalom races here at Beaver Creek, and the best young college and national team skiers showed up. Big races are always fun, if for no other reason than to watch the athletes out free-skiing before and after the race. These folks can really turn a pair of skis.

FIS Slalom Race Startline

Our friend Scott (youngest member of the US Ski Team) was in town for the race, and we hosted his dad (Shep) in our spare bedroom. The last time we saw them was a little over a month ago in Aspen for the US National Downhill Championships. It’s always a blast hanging out with these two, Shep and I swap stories from back in the 1980’s, and Scott is overflowing with enthusiasm for my favorite/second favorite sport. Scott had a pair of solid, if not stellar, runs in the first slalom race. In his defense this was his first time in a slalom course in about 3 weeks.

Kent gratefully accepts Scott's old GS racing skis

But the big news, aside from the fantastic day of skiing we had (I’ll get to that in a minute), was that when Shep pulled in last night, he said “I’ve got your skis all tuned and waxed,” which prompted a “what skis?” response from me. “We’re giving you a pair of Scott’s GS race skis from last year,” Shep said. A large grin spread over my face. “You can’t be serious?!?” I replied. “Yep, I’ll go get them,” whereupon Shep went out to the car and came back carrying a pair of race-stock 191cm Atomic Doubledeck beauties. These are the same skis that World Cup racers use, a fantastic and generous gift. The general public can’t even buy race-stock skis like these. Very stiff, very stable at speed, pure skiing fun in a 24 pound package.

The next morning was Saturday, race day, but before watching Scott’s races there was some business to attend to. Friday nights the Beav grooms Golden Eagle, a double-black diamond vertical skating rink where they hold the Birds of Prey World Cup Downhill race every year. This is one fun, fast slope, and to top things off, it had snowed a few inches after the grooming machines had worked the slope over last night. Shep and I caught first chair to the top of the mountain, and slid over to the top of the “Brink”, a fall-away pitch that marks the start of about 2000 vertical feet of sometimes brutal steeps. We paused to take in the quiet morning view, untracked snow laid out in front of us, then pushed off into a truly fantastic run of endless turns down untracked powder. Unfortunately Heather and Scott couldn’t join us, Heather because she was working and Scott because he was inspecting the race course.

After watching Scott’s two slalom runs, and grabbing a bite of lunch, we collected Heather and Scott and the four of us headed back to Golden Eagle for another go at the downhill course. Scott was still wearing his 165cm slalom race skis, which are short, twitchy, and very unstable at speed. They are designed for slow speed (~30 mph) and lots of quick turns. An appropriate ski for this slope is at least 190cm, and preferably 215cm (at this point I’m on Scott’s old 191cm GS skis).

If you remember my previous post about free-skiing with Scott, this story will have a familiar ring to it. We arrived at the top of the Brink, and Scott turns and says, “follow me, I’m going to ski the race line,” then points his slalom skis straight down the Brink and immediately accelerates to over 60 mph, through the Talon Turn, around Pete’s Arena, and past the Super G start. What the reader may not realize is that it is now after noon, which means that the slope is no longer the pristine groomed surface of our morning run, but rather is a jumble of snow piles, ridges, ruts, washboards, and moguls. I did my best to keep up, but Scott rapidly pulls away into the distance. And I’m the one with the skis more suited to this slope and speed.

Scott graciously pulls up to wait for me part way down, and then we’re off again, back to 60+ mph, around the Pumphouse turn, big air over the Screech Owl jump, and across the Parking Lot. This time I’m doing a little better keeping up. I see Scott look over his shoulder to check on me, then look back and fly off the Golden Eagle jump. I pre-jump it but still get decent air, then we swoop through a hard right-foot compression in the Abyss, over Bode’s Demise, a left foot turn into Harrier jump, shoot the pitch, and come to a stop at the top of Red Tail jump just above the finish line.  *Whew*.  It’s remarkable what effect peer pressure (from a 17-year old!) can have on a middle-aged, marginally accomplished skier.

After that Scott had to get back to the Team, and Heather, Shep and I spent the afternoon on a full, leisurely tour of the Bachelor Gulch and Arrowhead sections of the resort, making some great high-speed cruising laps on Sawbuck and Golden Bear. The final thing on the day’s agenda was a beer on the sun deck at the Ritz, and then we called it quits after a beautiful spring day covering 25,000 vertical feet.